Six Lighted Windows Introduction   One of the first things I recall seeing is the attendant with the wooden leg hobbling down the railroad track toward the station. Old Pegleg had been fired. He was not needed -- now that all these young men had come to be "tendants," as the patients called them, at Pennhurst. Moreover, they said, that leg could bruise and hurt you when he used it as a paddle. The "patients" were the mentally handicapped, 1500 of them, divided by gender into two encampments: women and girls on the hill, men and boys in the valley. But this was 1944 and we said "mentally deficient" in those days; later it became "retarded," and today one says "challenged." The new young men were the 30 members of Civilian Public Service Unit #129 who had arrived, some with their wives, to serve out their time in service alternative to the armed forces. In fact it was they who were challenged -- their ideal of nonviolence was to be put to the test as they handled the inmates and mixed with the staff. Housing for patients was in " cottages," long dormitories each with a large common sleeping room and a dayroom, sequestering the hundreds of men and boys. The cottages were scattered across the slopes of grass and trees which dropped down to the Schuylkill River and were named by letters of the alphabet: U 2 meant the second floor of "U" Cottage. This was the lockup. It had special attendants, like Pegleg. When you're sitting on a bench in a dayroom most of the day -- facing dozens of others, equally misshapen, who are mirroring your grimaces and pleasantries -- mealtime is momentous. Fed in shifts at wooden tables in vast kitchens where the cabbage, potatoes, and ground round were cooked in huge vats and cauldrons, patients slavered with anticipation as they marched in military formation to the hall. In the winter or in rain, this thrice daily trough tramping took place underground. Through long concrete tunnels decorated with the molds and rivulets that spread along seeping walls, one found one's way to one of three dining halls, each with its own menu: patients', attendants', management's. The odors of Pennhurst were in a class by themselves. Yet if it had not been for a nearly forgotten, tireless woman whose astonishing achievement this was, these unfortunates would still be wading in pig mud, feared and despised, kept in animal pens, caves and hovels run by mercenaries imprisoning their bodies and souls. For such was the case in 1843 when Dorothea L. Dix began her crusade to wake up the conscience and dispel the ignorance of the American people regarding the nature of insanity and retardation. It was not difficult at all for us to look over the Pennhurst scene and deplore it; very few of us seeing it had any idea how vastly improved had the lot of "inmates" become during the preceding hundred years, through her skillful agitation in one state legislature after another. Miss Dix served her country well. Appointed superintendent of women nurses at the outbreak of the Civil War, she not only managed that responsibility, but -- because of her national prominence -- she was now able to influence and further her campaign for state and federal legislation providing guidelines for institutionalizing the mentally ill. I often think, now, of how little the country has known or cared to remember this national hero (her face finally appeared on a one cent postage stamp), and of how little she ever valued credit for her achievements. Pennhurst was a monster of a state school. There was the bumbling bureaucracy with its proverbial blindness to abuses; the aging doctors who might or might not take seriously cases such as these; the paltry attempts at school classes, sports and recreation; the dirt, the vermin, the heartless scrimping; and, most of all, the physical and mental abuse dished out by hard-boiled and mercenary caretakers and supervisors. We, teachers and preachers, nurses and scholars, farmers and clerks of C.P.S. Unit 129, had come from all parts of the country, direct from outdoor camps. During that initial induction period we had dug ditches, reclaimed soil, cut trails and fought forest fires under the direction, sometimes benign, more often scornful, of the Forest Service and other bureaus of the Department of the Interior. Now we had won the privilege of submitting our convictions to the regimen of life in a state-run full-care institution. Administrators made use of our special skills -- replacing, ironically, men who then went off to war. Most of us worked as wardens, caretakers of this broken, pitiful and overlooked segment of humanity. A tremendous ferment took place, both in Pennhurst and in our lives. Each man (and woman, for there were half-a-dozen) was now plunged into unfamiliar work with new demands, hostility from the employees, along with ridicule from the brighter patients who picked up on the employees' disdain, all in addition to the usual displacements of war service. Our work shifts, six or more days a week, were often twelve hours long, our "allowance" fifteen dollars per month. As for the institution itself, there was a profound shakeup. One can only wonder if, in the end, it did not regret having accepted the "free" labor of the objectors. Partly as a result of this wartime involvement, Pennhurst went on to become of historical importance. It was chosen as a pioneer in the pilot program for transfer of the patients deemed suitable to halfway houses or hostels where, from the security of small, home-like urban centers, they were gradually to approach integration into normal public life. That program failed notoriously, for various reasons. But by then the state hospital had virtually shut down (saving the taxpayers millions of dollars), while the mentally incapacitated fell among the homeless we find on our streets today. There were happier moments; memory tends to drop much unpleasantness. I recall the light in the eyes of a boy finding someone to play a new game with him; the sheer novelty of being cared about, on the part of some man who had been left here long ago by bitter and forgetting parents; or getting administration finally to do something about an abusive situation. But our richest compensation may have lain in the fellowship to be found in this extraordinary company of very bright, sensitive and diversely talented draftees. We were received in third-floor quarters which had just been renovated and painted, then crowded by twos into rooms intended for one. The long halls led to a common room -- the focus, now, of what social and recreational life we could have. We did our best to gather books and jigsaw puzzles and to make it look and feel "homey," inventing activities and meetings to stimulate a corporate intellectual life. In this we met with some success, as in that dayroom we met such influential people as Norman Thomas, A.J. Muste, Douglas Steere, Muriel Lester and Bayard Rustin. The Peace Churches, responsible for the off-duty dimensions of C.P.S., were of the greatest help here in trying to take care of their people just as they had in the camps. War is famous for heightening religious interest and feeling, some of it conventional, conservative or fanatical, some of it idealistic, progressive, "spiritual". And we were not exempt from the power of that Zeitgeist. Though the men of Pennhurst Unit were pacifists from diverse origins -- Quaker, Mennonite, Methodist, Jewish, humanist -- we found much common ground. In the light of all the foregoing and considering the strain we were under, it should be no surprise that four or five banded together to use their free time for the study and practice of what could only be called "the spiritual life." I belonged to this group, the Gemeinde, as the most learned of us chose to nickname it -- perhaps a fancy word for club. Two pairs of roommates, in adjacent rooms, we made a common pool of our books and began to read and study together; during long walks on half-holidays, or on picnics near the river, we read from "The Garden of Proserpine" or Time Must Have a Stop or Four Quartets. Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard for us became first-name friends, as it were. We watched, from our own isolation and confinement, the entry into monastery life of Merton and Isherwood. When a weekend retreat in New Jersey under the leadership of Gilbert Kilpack was announced, we saved holidays and experienced it together. As a Friend (not by birth but of some years' standing) I was familiar with meditation as understood by Quakers. The word was used in connection with Meeting for Worship (silent), which took place usually once a week on First Day (Sunday) morning. It was the practice to sit in silence until the meeting became "gathered" in an undistracted, focused communal rapport. And this required something of the nature of meditation. Only then was the time ripe for individuals to be, perhaps, inspired to speak out on something of benefit to the gathering, a concern that was on the heart; otherwise the silence only deepened for the remainder of the hour. Never had I known or heard of Friends who "meditated" daily or privately. Yet the American Friends Service Committee, the social action arm of Quakerism, had us meditating in "work camp" in 1941. I recall how a dozen-and-a-half of us, college students, spent a sultry summer in Michigan as volunteers helping a Chicago Cooperative build recreation facilities in a camp at Circle Pines. Before work began in the morning we went out daily to the big oak in the front yard of the farmhouse and sat under it for twenty or thirty minutes of silent meditation. No methods were taught or suggested; perhaps we were mulling over Hegel or Kierkegaard residue of our bull sessions. So at Pennhurst the inner need intensified. After a weeks of working in the medical ward I lost all my previous projections of becoming a doctor or psychiatrist: the "miseries of the world" were all too real in the miseries of "Tom" and "Shorty" and "Red." All the mystics were telling us, "Physician, heal thyself," and that made sense. I saw that our failings, as ministers to these benighted souls and their keepers, were the failures of our own self-mastery. We could put patches on wounds or even on a mind -- but to heal? A soul? Of course they had souls, didn't they? How does one know? Before coming east I had often gone out alone in the California camp and sat on a hillock to ponder the dictum of Keats: "Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty -- that is all / Ye know on earth and all ye need to know." Was he right? I had found that Beauty was Truth, I thought; no questioning that. But is all truth beautiful? What did it mean? Here I was, about to embark on an adventure in the care of "Mongols, morons and idiots;" there was Truth for you! Would it be beautiful? One of our Gemeinde, the eldest and so the leader, had been a professor of literature; another was a Protestant youth and church worker; the third was Jewish by upbringing but fresh from college, brightly agnostic. All of us had served in the camps operated jointly by the three peace churches, so we had some acquaintance with meditation. None was imbued with Roman Catholic or oriental mystical traditions. The world of St. John of the Cross and Meister Eckhart, of St. Bernard and the two Teresas, of Veda and Gita, Buddha, Ramakrishna and the Sufis, fell suddenly upon us as if from storage bins high in the heavens. For me there was additional incentive. My eldest brother and his wife, also Friends, were visiting the retreat set up by Gerald Heard in Trabuco Canyon, California. They were sitting in awe as quotations from the mystics fell in profusion from Heard's learned lips. They were joining others in silence and prayer in the spherical oratory. They wrote to me about it. Supported by this, we four decided to learn to meditate. We thought we could learn it from books such as Raja-Yoga of Swami Vivekananda or Autobiography of a Yogi by Yogananda. Impressed with the importance of regularity, we sat together each evening -- setting a half-hour as our target. This, mind you, after 12 hours of duty, much of it wearying and stressful. Problems quite naturally arose. One of us regularly dozed off, inspiring others to do the same; another could not, for the life of him, concentrate his mind; another, forcing himself, might have subsequent nervous twitches or headaches. Books were not enough. A master was needed. And this is where my account really begins -- in the search for a spiritual teacher. With guru a word hardly known, and even "yoga" spoken of in muted tones, the search began on the part of this tiny band of like-minded truth-seekers huddled in an unlikely place, who eventually abandoned group meditation and went their separate ways -- but who, because of the grace of their initial experiences, were altogether convinced of the reality of the life of the spirit and committed to its practice. How I became the one who went out to look for a teacher, I am not sure; I believe the others urged me on their behalf. It took a long time. I had leave every month of one-and-a-half days and the journey to Philadelphia was time-consuming. One would have thought that among our Friends at the meetings there in the heartland, someone might be found to help us with our quest, but I did not at first discover one. No one there knew of any habitual meditator. From previous experience I was sure we would get little help on spiritual matters from the professionals in psychology of that era. I turned to the clergy and began knocking on ministerial doors. In turn I tried the pastors of Lutheran, Episcopal, Methodist, Congregational and other denominations. When I described what we were after, some said harsh things: "anachronistic," "medieval," this practice of meditation. Others knew nothing of it. Occasionally I would describe it as mental prayer -- a phrase which would have pleased Dorothea Dix. She, a Unitarian, had spent the first hour of her day in "prayer and meditation" and kept this up to the end of her life, saying it was what kept her up, through illness and despair. Still I had no luck. One minister admitted he had heard of meditation but knew naught of how to go about it. In later years there were those who asked why I had not tried the Catholic church, where there might have been some expertise. They forget that the church was in those days much more dogmatic and demanding than now. With our backgrounds, none of us could have paid that price. As it was, the master we found fit only me: Two of the group never had interviews with the swami, and my roommate, although he did so, did not become his student. At long last we turned up the name of a Joseph Wilson, a Friend who was said to be a daily meditator. I approached this man. He kindly agreed to see me and our meeting led me to Swami Yatiswarananda. I did not know then that my quest had ended. I found the teacher of spirituality -- for me. What I found in him and in subsequent teachers as well (upaguru is the Sanskrit word) is the subject of this book. Aum | About | Calendar | Articles | Stories | On-line books Bulletin board | Books & tapes | Links | Search | Contact